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Essay on Nietzsche and Socratism
Nietzsche refers to Socratism as a form of morality, and claims that his hostility to Socratism should be understood as part of his broader hostility to morality in general. In the late preface to The Birth of Tragedy, he says that "it was against morality that [his] instinct turned" in that book (Nietzsche 24). In general, his antipathy toward what he calls 'moral values' is aimed at those ways of life that seek, as he puts it, to deny life. In the context of his attack on Socratism in particular, the term 'morality' seems to refer to whatever it is in our religion, philosophy, and ethical life that, according to him, gives voice to our need for reasons. If, therefore, we are to understand what it means to treat Socratism as a form of morality, we need to know in what sense such a way of life could be said to strive to deny life.
His attack on Socratism suggests that culture is a form of community--a form, in particular, of what he gives us reason to think of as linguistic community. Nietzsche's conception of the role of the philosopher is the bad conscience of his time, where Socrates functions as a prototype of the individual. That is to say, it is Socrates' role to point out that the practices of his culture have become incoherent.
"He saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was already no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end. --And Socrates understood that all the world had need of him--his expedient, his cure, his personal art of self-preservation" (Nietzsche 32). Nietzsche does not believe that the Socratic question is intelligible in itself. Something has to happen..............
